Behind the scenes with the OA team
In this post we’ll look behind the scenes at the University’s Open Access team. And we will follow this up with posts introducing the individual members of the team. Most of the work we do behind the scenes is invisible, so called ‘auto-magical’ if you will. In some ways this is a good sign, to quote Futurama:
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all”. Futurama, ‘Godfellas’, 2002.
But looking at it another way, it could also be unhelpful, as researchers might not know who to contact if they have questions or concerns. So, in this post we are going to expose some of our more auto-magical tasks.
Firstly this is where we are located – in the Old Union Diner on Butts Wynd:
So what do we do?
Well, the short answer is rather a lot! But, broadly the team is responsible for:
- Open access advocacy, and related advice on copyright and licensing
- Funder and institutional open access policy compliance
- Managing central open access funds
- Reporting to research funders on OA compliance and spend
- REF open access monitoring and compliance
- Pure publications monitoring, validation, and reporting
- Management of the St Andrews Research Repository
- Supporting OA infrastructure: Pure, DSpace (repository), and OJS system testing
- Training, advice, and technical support for our journal hosting platform – OJS
- Maintaining statistics on publication downloads and usage.
- Maintaining open access webpages, blogs, lib guide, social media
- and so on…
Each of these points can be drilled down further of course to other tasks, but we’ll just take a look at one aspect of our work which is often assumed to be an automatic process: Pure publications monitoring and validation. In Pure each member of the team has a number of filters set up. These are set up to capture Pure records that meet certain criteria, and exclude those that don’t. We have filters to capture all newly created records for instance, these are mainly checked by Kirsty who checks to see if the publication should be Open Access, and then this sparks further actions by the team and usually some correspondence with the researcher too. Another filter is set to capture records where a researcher has uploaded a file – this filter is checked daily by all members of the OA team. The usual process that follows is to check for copyright issues and publisher open access policies, and in many cases this is followed by correspondence with authors and publishers too. This is a really important filter, as researchers have usually uploaded a file in order to meet the REF Open Access requirements. So, let’s look at this one in more detail.
We have a duty of care towards the publications in Pure and we want to ensure they are archived in perpetuity.
Pure filter management – ‘Full text not yet validated’ filter/validation workflow
For the REF open access requirements, researchers are required to upload accepted manuscripts for all articles published in journals and conference proceedings. Researchers are also encouraged to upload manuscripts for other output types too, such as reports, book chapters, conference papers, etc. This filter catches all this, so it is quite a busy filter and one that needs to be checked regularly. Each member of the team has a filter for this, each having oversight over particular schools and departments: Currently Kirsty has the geography and earth sciences schools, Kyle has mainly arts and humanities as well as psychology and chemistry, Michael has mainly sciences, and Jackie covers management and economics. In many cases the deposit of a file, and the subsequent appearance into our filter, is the first we know of a publication. And, in many cases this then leads to further enquiries, for instance if a certain research funder is acknowledged, or a journal turns out to require publication fees (either for open access or otherwise). In the majority of cases though we are able to complete the Pure record with publication details found online, and then ‘validate’ the record for public release. This process ultimately sends the file and the publication information to the institutional repository where it can be freely downloaded. Often public release follows only after an embargo period (as defined by the publisher), and this is something the OA team takes care of as well. When publications come out of embargo we often promote this too on Twitter:
A common concern voiced by researchers is that by uploading accepted manuscripts to Pure they may be breaking copyright rules or publishers’ policies. But this concern is based on a lack of clarity about what exactly happens when files are uploaded to Pure. In all cases we will see files on records and by default they will be hidden from public view until we have checked the record. As part of our checks, we will always ensure that copyright and publisher policies are respected. Indeed, we have a duty of care towards the publications in Pure and we want to ensure they are archived in perpetuity. So when a file is uploaded to a Pure record, it is in safe hands. This last point is important and sits in contrast to the quote at the head of this post. Sometimes ‘auto-magical’ isn’t helpful, and sometimes it is good to know that there is a ‘person behind the curtain’ if you will.
So, here we’ve taken a closer look at some of the work that goes on behind the scenes to enable Open Access to research publications here at the University of St Andrews. In the next posts, we’ll be hearing from the individual members of the team, and we’ll be asking burning questions such as: what do you say when people ask, “So, what do you do for a living?”